Francis Urquhart
Francis Urquhart (1936-2002) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1991 to 2002, succeeding Henry Collingridge and preceding Tom Makepeace. Urquhart was a member of the hard right of the Conservative Party, and he was known to be a Machiavellian leader who used conspiracies and betrayals to eliminate his enemies and advance his own position. He was assassinated in 2001 by the brother of two Cypriot EOKA guerrillas whom he had killed during the Cyprus Emergency in 1956. Biography Francis Urquhart was born in 1936, the youngest of the Earl of Bruichcladdich's three sons; his oldest brother was killed during World War II, while his middle brother sat in the House of Lords. He was educated at Eton College, and he served in the British Army in Cyprus for three years, taking part in the capture and interrogation of EOKA terrorists. He resigned his commission after a colleague was court-martialed for accidentally killing a suspect, and he went on to study at the University of Oxford, where he would go on to teach Renaissance Italian History. He married Elizabeth McCullough, the daughter of a whiskey magnate, and he later abandoned academia in favor of politics. After his father's suicide, Urquhart resolved to enter politics rather than maintain his father's estate, leading to his mother disowning him. He abandoned the academia and rose in the ranks of the Conservative Party, rising to the rank of chief whip. Urquhart lived on an estate in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, and he was elected MP for New Forest. He was a hard-right member of the Tories, and he supported abolishing the Arts Council, outlawing vagrancy, reintroducing conscription, banning pensioners from the NHS unless they paid for age insurance, and opposed the welfare state. Following Henry Collingridge's emergence as Prime Minister and Conservative leader in 1990, Urquhart submitted a memorandum to Collingridge that would contemplate a prominent ministerial position for Urquhart himself. Urquhart believed that the time had come for change in Britain, and he proposed the appointment of many rural and right-wing Conservatives, none of whom were from the liberal wing of the party. Collingridge rejected the memorandum due to his belief that it would hurt the party's popularity, leading to Urquhart secretly plotting against him. Urquhart fabricated or engineered scandals within the Conservative Party to eliminate his enemies, with Collingridge being forced to resign. Urquhart then forced his fellow party officials to back down, doing so by threatening to publish pictures of Education Secretary Harold Earle in the company of a male prostitute, causing Health Secretary Peter MacKenzie to accidentally run over a disabled man, forcing Foreign Secretary Patrick Woolton to withdraw by blackmailing him with a sex tape, and damaging Environment Secretary Michael Samuels' image by revealing his past communist associations. Prior to the final ballot, he murdered public relations consultant Roger O'Neill, and he then killed reporter Mattie Storin, his main contact in the press, to prevent Storin (also his lover) from revealing his conspiracies in the press. Premiership Urquhart became Prime Minister following Collingridge's resignation and the ensuing leadership contest, and he pushed his hardline agenda despite opposition from the monarchy. His former allies Tim Stamper and Sarah Harding were murdered in what appeared to be IRA terrorist attacks, but were, in reality, assassinations ordered by Urquhart to end their conspiracies against him. By his third term in office, Urquhart was embattled and increasingly unpopular, and he was driven only by his desire to beat Margaret Thatcher's record for time served in office. Downfall Urquhart made the reunification of Cyprus a major goal of his, and he fired his pro-European Foreign Secretary Tom Makepeace due to his liberal views, which clashed with Urquhart's Anglocentric and far-right views. After a raid on civil war-stricken Cyprus led to children and other innocents being killed, his own party rebelled against him, and Makepeace gained possession of records incriminating Urquhart in the murders of Cypriot civilians during the 1950s, as well as his involvement in Mattie Storin and Roger O'Neill's murders. Urquhart's own bodyguard, on the orders of Urquhart's wife (who was also his lover), shot Urquhart with a sniper rifle as he attended the unveiling of a Margaret Thatcher statue. He then shot would-be assassin Evanghelos Passolides (the brother of the two Cypriot men whom Urquhart had killed in Cyprus), who approached Urquhart with a pistol. Passolides' death after Urquhart's death made it appear as if Passolides had killed Urquhart before himself being killed by security. Makepeace succeeded Urquhart as Prime Minister. Category:1936 births Category:2002 deaths Category:British prime ministers Category:British politicians Category:British Category:Prime ministers Category:Politicians Category:Protestants Category:Conservative Party members Category:British conservatives Category:Conservatives Category:Killed Category:English